Creativebits

The new Airport Time Capsule is one sweet piece of hardware that can replace lots of hardware and cables with one slick tall white box.

In a nutshell it is 3 things in one:

Superfast 1300 Mbps WiFi (802.11ac) base station

2-3TB of Time Capsule backup hard disk

Allows you to connect a printer or another HD to access wirelessly

The only thing is doesn't do is stream iTunes music to external speakers. Only the smaller Airport Express can do that.

iOS7's is visually organazed into layers. The background moves slightly by default to give you the feeling that the icons are floating above it. But if you select any panoramic image as a background you can achieve an even more impressive effect. As you move your phone around the panorama slides behind the icons. Watch the video explaining how to switch it on.

Dear Readers, from now on we will point the Forum menupoint on Creativebits to GraphicDesignForum.com, which has recently been upgraded and specializes in Graphic Design Discussions and point Critique to the Brands of the World Logo Critique section which is a premier place on the web to get a critique on your logo. I intend to focus on making the features on both GraphicDesignForum and Brands of the World Critique as good as possible. I understand this change may not be ideal for some of you, but I'm hoping you will try those new sites for your forum and critique needs.

In the 19th and well into the 20th century, the museums of the world, as well as the homes of collectors, were filled with plaster. More specifically, these were plaster casts made from the bronze or marble originals of the more notable examples of Greek and Roman sculpture. Plaster, because this was an inexpensive medium for making very accurate copies. So there's a certain coherence in Cosmo Wenman's current mission, which is to use 3D printing to make these classics even more broadly available than before.

It turns out that there is a repository of more than 2,000 of these sculptures in the Swiss Skulpturhalle Basel museum. Rather remarkable, considering how fragile they are. But even more remarkable is that the museum has provided Wenman with permission to 3D scan his pick of these and make them available for free download at the popular Thingiverse site. In fact, if you take a look there you'll find that Wenman has been 3D scanning works from antiquity for some time, often tapping significant collections such as the British Museum, Tate Britain, the Getty Villa and the Louvre. But now he wants to bump this up to a new level via a Kickstarter project to scan at least 20 of the most significant works from the Skulpturhalle Basel collection. He positions the project this way:

"Recent advances in 3D scanning and 3D printing technologies are opening up new opportunities for the average person to possess and enjoy beautiful sculptural artwork of their own. Eventually, 3D printable designs of the entire world's cultural heritage of sculptural masterworks will be available to everyone, and this project is my attempt to make that happen sooner rather than later."

I think Wenman is on to something. Hopefully his Kickstarter project will catch fire and get funded, as a significant first step in freeing the world's sculptural riches from vaults, museums and the private collections of the lucky few and making them broadly available.

As a "weekend project" Brian Chan recently decided to push the capabilities of CSS into the domain of recreating well-known corporate logos. The result is quite impressive although from a practical perspective such an approach isn't viable, given the increasing adoption of SVG vector graphics that make this little more than a virtuoso display of counter-intuitive coding. But as Samuel Johnson, of dictionary fame, once said of a dog walking on its hind legs, "It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all." The images below show the CSS-created and original versions of the old Apple logo, with the superimposition showing just how close you can get. Count me surprised.

See more CSS logos on the bchanx site.

I've been watching with interest the Kickstarter project that has as its goal creating a series of short films about design firm the Designers Republic, which in its 25 year history has helped push design as we know it into some fresh new spaces. The good news is that with just three days to go the project has now been funded, with support ranging from £1 up to £1,000. But of course it's not too late to get a piece of the action, with the clip below providing some background. Let's hope we'll see more such films devoted to key design firms, whether Kickstarter-funded or not.

Chicago-based photographer Paul Octavious has embarked on an ambitious program of matching colors from the Pantone Plus Series Formula Guides to his observations in the real world. Which is not exactly what these were designed for but what the heck — it's more an example of how important it is to stay awake and be aware of what you're looking at. Paul just began this projet so you can stay current by following him on Instagram.

In our digital age, the power of objects crafted by hand is more compelling than ever. If traditional media has recently become newly popular in the graphic arts, the ancient artisanal practice of sign painting, at one time nearly extinct, also seems to be making something of a comeback. Sign Painters, a documentary film and book by Faythe Levine and Sam Macon, takes a look at the work and practices of more than two dozen American sign painters. The film's website lists upcoming screenings and sign painter sites, examples from which I've posted below, along with the trailer for the movie.

Compuserve may be a distant memory to most of us but we can thank it for popularizing the GIF file format that lives on in the form of web animations, having outlived the usage of both Java and Flash. While slick GIF cinemagraphs can still catch our attention, you can't beat a clunky, badly looped animation that uses appropriated content in a comical setting. The Digiday site, which covers digital media, marketing and advertising, recently posted an amusing GIF-invested collection of these entitled 20 Surefire Ways to Anger Creatives. Ranging from such classics as Make Them Work on Banners through Change the Office Dress Policy to “Business Casual,” the GIF above illustrates Put Them On the Phone with a Client.

No, that's not a touch-based version of Photoshop shown above. Instead, this is a still from a clip (shown below) in which Senior Photoshop Product Manager Zorana Gee is showing off new 3D capabilities in what will be, as of June, Photoshop CC, now that the Extended version is gone. But be still, my beating heart! Is that not Photoshop CS7 I see in the application title bar? Which would seem to indicate that scrapping the CS7 moniker and going with CC was a fairly recent decision. While raising another question — what will future versions of the CC applications be called?

Last month I asked what now seems like a prophetic question: Why Don't We All Love Adobe? My take was that Adobe had stopped listening to the concerns of its long-time customers. So when it recently announced that our future would be Creative Cloud-only, I wasn't surprised that more than a few customers responded with a blunt, "No thanks." Typical are the comments on NAPP president Scott Kelby's blog — hell hath no fury like a Photoshop user scorned. Then there's this thread in the Adobe forums and in the comments to John Nack's blog here and here. And of course the Change.org petition asking Adobe to continue providing a perpetually licensed alternative.

Unless Adobe responds quickly and significantly to such customer concerns, Creative Suite 6 may well be the final iteration of Adobe products for more than a few users, who will make do with the 2012 release while exploring replacements. And Photoshop CS6 might well go on to become one of the most pirated applications of all time. Adobe has been making noises in the last few days that it will provide some kind of solution for photographers and also resolve the issue of not being able to access files once a subscription ends. Which will help. But it may be too little, too late, for more than a few loyal Adobe customers.

My take on Creative Cloud has always been that it was an innovative offering that made sense for those using a lot of its apps and services, and were hungry for constant feature updates. But I've never seen it as a one-size-fits-all, subscribe or get lost, proposition. So I was as taken aback as anyone on Monday when the fatal announcement was made, with my concerns laid out clearly in a Creative Cloud Chronicles column last week. Will Adobe be able to turn things around and regain the trust of their disgruntled customers? And, more importantly, do they even want to? I honestly have no idea.

It's an old meme but as Homer Simpson once said, "It works in so many ways." As you might imagine, in the clip below Hitler isn't too happy when he finds out that in fact there will be no CS7.

You can poke it with a stick all you want but it's official — Creative Suite is out and Creative Cloud is in. Way in. Actually, make that all in. To the point where CS6 is now the final Suite and has been put on life support, with sales ending in the indeterminate future. Adobe made official yesterday what many of us had anticipated for some time, namely that its Creative Cloud service would become the focal point of its offering of tools and services to the creative and development community.

The keynote presentation delivered yesterday at the MAX Creativity Conference was notable for the sound of nails being hammered in the coffin of perpetual licenced applications, with demo after demo and announcement after announcement reinforcing Adobe's commitment to a membership-only future. Photoshop CC is the new moniker for our favorite image editing app, with it and its brethren to be made available in June for the happy few with subscriptions. So is the glass half full or half empty?

Before you jump to conclusions, I suggest you take a look at the laundry list of functionality that has been added to the new version of Photoshop. While those who believe that everything after version 7 has been bloatware won't be pleased, the rest of us who actually make a living using it will have to admit that the new functionality isn't all window dressing. Here's a tip: if you own Photoshop CS3-CS6, have no interest in the other CC applications and services, and only want to use the new version of Photoshop, you can take advantage of a single-app membership, available for $9.99 per month (with an annual commitment), a special offer that is available until July 31st, 2013. Since this includes things like a Behance ProSite membership worth a hundred bucks, it's a pretty good deal. This offer doesn't seem to be available in all countries, however, which is annoying.

So what do you think? Are we all doomed to be ground up like sausage in the evil subscription machine that is Creative Cloud? Or is this the dawning of a golden era of affordably-priced applications and services? Beats me.

You can get more info about Photoshop CC on the Photoshop.com blog and the Adobe site. The Creative Cloud FAQ is a good place to start if all this is new to you.

From Adobe: http://xdce.adobe.com/mighty/

Our XD team revealed a few projects they're working on at Adobe MAX 2013. The team has been exploring how new form factor displays, new interactions (like touch and gesture), cloud connections and even new hardware might change how you all create and in turn how it might impact what software we need to build. Watch the video to get the full overview.

http://youtu.be/Jexqp-MK0pI

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yes I'm brazilian xD

It was just a few years ago that scientists managed to user lasers to etch the Bible on the head of a pin. While that was impressive enough, the latest feat of miniaturization comes to us from good old IBM. It would seem that its scientists have created a 90-second animation composed of 242 frames, each of which depicts a stylized figure of a boy. Sounds dull so far. But the twist is that the figure is made up of individual carbon atoms. Now that's small.

Whimsically dubbed A Boy and His Atom, as you might guess the resulting clip (below) is a proof of concept of just how small the elements of nature are that we can now manipulate. Science sure is great. Now if we can just figure out how to keep 15 million children from dieing of hunger each year. Oh, wait, there are no research funds available for that.

Introducing Google Now for iOS. Just the right information, at just the right time, before you even ask. Weather, traffic, transit schedules, even the latest scores come automatically, appearing throughout the day just as you need them. There's no digging required. Google Now organizes the things you need to know, freeing you up to focus on what's important to you. To use Google Now on your iPhone or iPad, get the Google Search app from the App Store and sign into your Google account.

THE FILM before THE FILM was apparently the result of a research project at the BTK (Berliner Technische Kunsthochschule) that took a look at film credits from the silent era through to the digital age. If you're a type aficionado, there's lots here to like. You can view it below.

So where do you go when you're in the mood to browse the design work of others, whether for inspiration or just out of idle curiosity? Behance would probably be your first place to start, perhaps followed by Dribble. After that you'd have your pick of second-tier sites, such as Designspiration, Fubitz and Minimalissimo. But what if you could search all these sites at once from a single point? That's the premise behind the Niice.co site, which aggregates images from all these, with more on the way. It's still in beta and doesn't always return the results you'd expect, as well as sometimes slowing to a crawl, but it would seem to be a move in the right direction.

Adobe is giving away 1,000 of these rather nice posters. Only downside is that it will cost you a Facebook Like and sharing your friends list.

Hyper-lapse videos -- made by combining time-lapse photography with camera movements -- have been popular for a while now. But digital experience builder Teehan+Lax has now released a free tool that makes it possible to create these using shots from Google Street View. Appropriately dubbed Google Street View Hyperlapse, it can be used as-is or the open source code can be tweaked to manipulate such things as frame rate, image quality and camera movements. The clip below shows what it's capable of.